Ocasio-Cortez RIPS Moderates, Reagan And Capitalism

Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unloaded during an interview at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas where she slammed political moderates, claimed the country was slightly above “garbage” status and alleged former President Ronald Reagan was a racist.

“Moderate is not a stance. It’s just an attitude towards life of, like, ‘meh,’” Ocasio-Cortez said to the Intercept’s Briahna Gray, Fox News reports. “We’ve become so cynical, that we view ‘meh,’ or ‘eh’ — we view cynicism as an intellectually superior attitude, and we view ambition as youthful naivete when … the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of visions, and the ‘meh’ is just worshipped now, for what?”

Fox News also reports the Democrat socialist shared a disparaging view of Reagan:

The self-declared Democratic socialist also criticized the treatment of minorities throughout American history, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which she claimed was racist, to Ronald Reagan’s policies, which she said “pitted” white working class people against minorities in order “to screw over all working-class Americans,” particularly African-Americans and Hispanics.

Other topics Ocasio-Cortez discussed included the Green New Deal and capitalism, which she said could not be redeemed because it puts profit “above everything else.”

“So you think about this image of welfare queens and what he was really trying to talk about was … this like really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, that were ‘sucks’ on our country,” the New York Congresswoman said.

“And it’s this whole tragedy of the commons type of thinking where it’s like because … this one specific group of people, that you are already kind of subconsciously primed to resent, you give them a different reason that’s not explicit racism but still rooted in a racist caricature,” she continued, Fox News reports. “It gives people a logical reason, a ‘logical’ reason to say, ‘Oh yeah, no, toss out the whole social safety net.'”

“The most important thing is the concentration of capital, and it means that we prioritize profit and the accumulation of money above all else, and we seek it at any human and environmental cost… But when we talk about ideas like democratic socialism, it means putting democracy and society first, instead of capital first; it doesn’t mean that the actual concept of capitalistic society should be abolished,” she said.

Asked moments later about the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and the $15 minimum wage, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that America is in decline and that the current state of America is “garbage.”

“I think the thing that is really hard for people to sometimes see is that when we are on this path of a slow erosion and a slow, slow, slow, just like move away from what we’ve always been, we’ll be a hundred miles, you’ll, you know you won’t even realize that you’ve drifted a hundred miles,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So, when someone’s talking about our core, it’s like oh this is radical, but this isn’t radical, this is what we’ve always been.”

“It’s just that now we’ve strayed so far away from what has really made us powerful, and just, and good, and equitable, and productive, and so I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are but where we are is not a good thing,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And this idea of like 10% better from garbage, is, shouldn’t be what we settle for, it’s like this like it feels like moderate is not a stance it’s just an attitude toward life of like hmmm.”

“One of the keys to dismantling fear is dismantling a zero-sum mentality,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “It means the rejection outright of the logic that says someone else’s gain necessitates my loss and that my gain must necessitate someone’s loss. We can give without a take. We’re viewing progress as a loss instead of as an investment. When we choose to invest in our system, we are choosing to create wealth. When we all invest in them, then the wealth is for all of us too.”